We live in the United States, not Confederate States | Opinion

Confederate statues were erected as anti-American propaganda; they all should be removed.

The statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest stands at Health Sciences Park in Downtown Memphis on Oct. 5, 2017. The statue has since been taken down after the city sold the park to a private nonprofit.(Photo: Yalonda M. James / The Commercial Appeal)

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On Dec. 20 a year ago, I was sitting in my game room at home in Collierville playing Xbox. At the same time, monuments to Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis were being taken down in Downtown Memphis.

Some of my friends were strongly in favor of the statues coming down, while others believed the statues needed to remain standing. At the time, I did not know enough to care.

One year later, after a semester in a course on “The Civil War and American Memory” at Rhodes College, I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that these monuments should have come down.

I am a proud Puerto Rican, and one of my favorite childhood memories is walking the streets of San Juan (the capital of Puerto Rico) and getting to see El Morro.

El Morro is an American National Monument, a fort that was fought over for centuries, and I always viewed it as a tremendous place in which many a hero fought to protect the island. It is located in an exceedingly popular area and nearly every person who lives on, or has visited, the island has visited it.

Castillo San Felipe del Morro in Old San Juan is a National Historic Site (World Heritage Site). The Spanish spent over 250 years fortifying the location of Puerto Rico, since through it, Spain controlled all access in and out of the Caribbean.(Photo: Ricardo Rolon / The News-Press, Ricardo Rolon / The News-Press)

Walking past and through this fort made me proud to be a Puerto Rican, and remembering that feeling made it clear that the Confederate monuments all throughout the United States need to be taken down.

As I learned this semester, the Confederate monuments are remnants of the Lost Cause movement, an effort by ex-Confederates after the Civil War to alter the story. The creators of the Lost Cause wanted to romanticize the South as an ideal society that was tragically overwhelmed on the battlefield by the North’s superior numbers.

The Lost Cause attempted to downplay the role of slavery in bringing about the war, to ignore the fact that African Americans fought for their freedom on the side of the Union, and to preserve the culture of white supremacy throughout the South.

The underlying purpose of the Lost Cause movement was, in the face of Confederate defeat, to continue to pass on these beliefs to the next generation. One of the main ways they did this was by erecting monuments to honor the leaders of the Confederacy.

These monuments stand in opposition to American values. They honor men who stood against the freedom of all Americans and disparage the ideals upon which the United States was founded.

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The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” but this country has a long history of discrimination and oppression. If the United States really wants to prove that discrimination and bigotry have been extinguished, Americans need to begin by taking down Confederate monuments.

Every day, this country struggles to eliminate the underlying seeds of racism and prejudice that remain from the past, but it has not taken the simplest of measures to liberate itself from this tragic history by removing Confederate monuments from all public spaces.

Removing monuments will make it evident that those who fought to uphold the systems of oppression that existed in the past should not be looked up to. Removing monuments will make it clear where the United States stands on this issue and would eliminate any confusion.

Children walking through their hometown of Memphis, as I did the streets of San Juan years ago, should not walk past statues of people who fought for things that our country does not support.
Children need to be aware of the oppressive system of slavery upon which the Confederacy rested. The United States is a country that was founded upon the ideals of liberty and freedom for all, and I personally believe these values are what sets it above the rest.

History shapes the mindset of the generations to come, and the last thing this country needs is the youth being influenced by an alternate history that promotes a culture of oppression.